Hasta La Ideas

This is a follow-up to my previous essay on the Future of Transportation, which is a useful if not requisite prologue to some of the ideas that I explore in the following analysis.

Images courtesy of Hiriko unless otherewise noted

MIT Media Lab’s CityCar concept had been in the works for years prior to its unveiling as “Hiriko” (Basque for ‘urban car’) this past January; a new video demo is the occasion for a recent wave of press. The two-person electric vehicle has attracted quite a bit of attention for its manifold innovations, including the (not yet street legal) electric chassis:

The design utilizes a novel technology called Robot Wheels. The Robot Wheel modules are controlled electronically using by-wire systems made popular by the aerospace industry and is attached to the four corners of the foldable chassis designed by the MIT team. Each Robot Wheel can be independently controlled allowing the CityCar to execute tight maneuvers that are helpful when driving in cities such as spinning on its own axis to achieve an “O-turn.” The removal of traditional drivetrain elements like gasoline engine, transmissions, and gearboxes allows for an unencumbered chassis thus freeing up space for folding linkages.

The “folding linkages” between the two sets of wheels allows the Hiriko to fold from eight feet long down to five, and coupled with the pivoting wheelbase, the car takes up just one-third of a standard parking space: it’s literally a straightforward solution to maximizing curbside parking, with potential to alleviate pockets of congestion caused by poor parallel parking. Moreover, the novelty of the canopy-style windshield (seen in the video below) belies its true benefits: the upward-swinging door safely deposits both passengers on the curb. (This would also be a boon to door-fearing cyclists.)

Labored voiceover aside, the demo of the chassis at 1:00 is pretty cool….

But—lest the Hiriko become the next Segway—the technology angle is just one side of the story: the vehicle has vertical and horizontal implications, from manufacturing to transit dynamics. The Times‘ Wheels blog has a brief history of the CityCar project and its economic upshot and the Guardian is optimistic about its social impact. Beyond the hardware innovations, Hiriko was developed with a sort of hybrid ZipCar-meets-bikeshare accessibility model:

The team also created a new model of mobility that would utilize the CityCar and other lightweight EVs in a shared-use scheme. By deploying CityCars at charging points distributed throughout a metropolitan area the MIT team envisioned a new network of vehicles that would allow any user of the system to simply walk-up, swipe an access card, pick-up a vehicle, and drive to any other charging point. Called Mobility-on-Demand, this strategy would provide high levels of convenience and flexibility found in shared systems like bike sharing programs, available in much of Europe and now in North America.

This, of course, is none other than the ‘First and Last Mile’ problem, those tiresome gaps between your home, your mass transit hub, and your workplace. In many cases, it’s more convenient to default to a car, which will take you from door-to-door (or at least garage-to-garage) despite the congestion and footprint; hence the challenge for urban planners. An article in Pacific Standard sums it up nicely:

Drivers use them like shared bikes, picking up a car at a Hiriko depot near where they’re coming from, and dropping it at one near their destination. Thus they address the “last mile” problem of mass transit and “might be most useful at the edges of cities where the transit network is sparse,” explains architect Kent Larson, director of the MIT research group. “In an inner city where it’s very walkable to begin with and then you have good trams or subways or buses, you don’t need the vehicles so much. But at the edges you have a desperate need for additional mobility.”

Even so, the Hiriko strikes me as at least one step (and one generation) removed from reality, at best a new subcategory of public transportation… and at worst the electric successor to the Mini Cooper and the SmartCar; simply a smaller, more efficient car, as opposed to an ideological breakthrough. This last characterization is not intended as a criticism but a counterpoint to hyperbolic headlines such as “Car Sharing With Crazy Folding Cars Is Coming To Europe“; for what it’s worth, I have utmost respect for the “anti-disciplinary research team” behind the Smart Cities project and their late adviser William Mitchell (1944-2010). In fact, I believe that the Hiriko is an absolutely worthy solution to their stated mission “to take on the biggest issues facing cities today: congestion, inefficient energy and land-use, air and noise pollution, and carbon emissions leading to global warming.”

In fairness to the Smart Cities team, the CityCar is just one of the three concepts—the most highly developed one—in their original propsal for “Mobility-on-Demand.”¹

Mobility-on-Demand systems also addresses what transportation planners call the “First Mile, Last Mile” problem of mass transit systems, by providing mobility near or at a user’s origin and final destination by creating a intermodal network that is complementary and synergistic to transit systems. In addition to the CityCar, the Smart Cities team also designed a folding electric motor scooter called the RoboScooter, and an electric assist bicycle called the GreenWheel. The GreenWheel integrates Lithium-ion batteries with electric motors into a modular hub unit that could easily be retrofitted into any standard bicycle. Together with the CityCar, the RoboScooter and GreenWheel would create a Mobility-on-Demand ecosystem of lightweight and low-energy EVs, where users can select the appropriate vehicle for each trip segment.

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